Life and College

So the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you
from going to grad school. Just be warned you'll have to do a lot of
stuff you don't like.

Number one will be your dissertation. Almost everyone hates their
dissertation by the time they're done with it. The process inherently
tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out of whole
wheat flour and baked for twelve hours. Few dissertations are read with
pleasure, especially by their authors.

But thousands before you have suffered through writing a
dissertation. And aside from that, grad school is close to
paradise. Many people remember it as the happiest time of their
lives. And nearly all the rest, including me, remember it as a period
that would have been, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation.

If you want an average successful life, it doesn't take much
planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you
might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

Become the best at one specific thing.

Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few
people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don't
recommend anyone even try.

Almost all of us have childhood dreams; for example, being an astronaut,
or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don't
achieve theirs, and I think that's a shame. I had several childhood
dreams, and I've actually achieved most of them. More importantly, I
have found ways, in particular the creation (with Don Marinelli), of
CMU's Entertainment Technology Center of helping many young people
actually achieve their childhood dreams.

This talk will discuss how I achieved my childhood dreams (being in zero
gravity, designing theme park rides for Disney, and a few others), and
will contain realistic advice on how *you* can live your life so that
you can make your childhood dreams come true, too.

I also decided that I did not have to convince others of my views for
those views to be good. They only needed to be good to me. I didn't have
to argue and win points. Arguments rarely have 'winners' anyway. I could
tell what I believed (even how to make a computer) and if others didn't
agree, they were not bad. They just thought differently. I would have
the belief that my thoughts were good and were inside my head and that's
all that mattered.
...
The best things I did in my young years leading up to the early Apple
computers were done because I had little money and had to think deeply
to achieve the impossible. Also, I had never done those technologies or
studied them. I had to write the book myself. Being self-taught,
figuring out how to design computers with pencil and paper, made me
skilled at finding solutions that I had not been taught.

Should you stop school after you graduate from high school, or continue
on to college?

Going to college definitely sounds better. Almost every authority
figure in your life - educators and family alike - recommend it to each
and every student. But as you may have noticed, authority figures are
often untrustworthy. Indeed, they usually bend the truth whenever
honesty makes them look bad. This doesn't mean you shouldn't go to
college, but it is a reason to second-guess the party line, to seek out
ugly facts parents and educators would rather ignore.

Research and Grad School

Over on the
other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with
one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our
secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join
you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And
I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And
after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And
after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing
is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to
something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't
welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with!...

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do
important work...

This line is frequently quoted (included
in Levoy's
talk), and seems obviously right, but I think its wrong and dangerous! Much better to work on obviously fun
problems, than obviously important ones.
See Richard
Feynman's letter to Koichi Mano for a better perspective on this.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more
work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But
10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth
working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in
importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of
interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world
is and what might be important.

For three years I lived next door to Facebook. Literally next door. I
could throw a rock from my bedroom window and break a window in Mark
Zuckerberg's office. They have a particular culture at Facebook: young,
edgy, in-your-face. Their walls are covered with graffiti and posters,
spray-painted in Wild West Wanted-dead-or-alive font. One of them says:
"Move fast, break things." Their offices have concrete floors, no
interior walls and lots of skateboards, so I imagine they do break things.
My favorite poster says, "What would you do if you weren't afraid?"
Being afraid is useful. On the savannah it kept us from being eaten by
lions. Nevertheless, this is the message I'd like to leave you with, the
same message my mentor Don Greenberg gave to me. Know your fears, know
also what you really want, weigh the odds, and occasionally, make a run
for it.

I must caution you, though, about an important enemy against this kind
of informal interactions. The Internet. Okay, so my research focuses on
the Internet, so it may seem strange for me to be so negative about it,
but this is important so I'll make an exception. The Internet makes it
far too easy to work from home, or a cafe, or on the train, rather than
in your office or lab with your peers. Your choice to work away from the
office is, in fact, perfectly rational. Coming into the office has a
defined cost, in terms of your time and (perhaps) having to get out of
your pajamas and take a shower. And, all of this is in exchange for some
vague, speculative benefit -- that you might have a chance encounter
that truly changes your research. And, frankly, in any one day, you
probably won't have a profound experience in your office, and your
officemates may not even be in the same scholarly mood as you. But, I
entreat you to go anyway.

To pick an area: be sure you like the
incremental results — you should consider them important, or at
least fun!

Alan Turing's advice on finishing a PhD thesis (from a letter to his
mother, 7 May 1938)

My Ph. D. thesis has been delayed a good deal more than I expected.
Church made a number of suggestions which resulted in the thesis being
expanded to an appalling length. I hope the length of it won't make it
difficult to get it published. I lost some time too when getting it
typed by a professional typist here. I took it to a firm which was very
well spoken of, but they put a very incompetent girl onto it. She would
copy things down wrong on every page from the original, which was almost
entirely in type. I made long lists of corrections to be done and even
then it would not be right. ...
I had an offer of a job here as von Neumann's assistant at $1,500 a year
but decided not to take it.

A dwindling minority of traditionalists still oppose academic tipping;
they instead cling to the old system whereby graduate students curried
favor by emulating the thoughts and actions of their major professor,
thus promulgating the "old fogy's" persona indefinitely. Clearly, this
antiquated system stifled academic creativity far too long.

A good analogy to academic tipping has operated effectively in the
United States Congress for over 150 years. Congressmen are given "tips"
in the form of campaign contributions or such other gratuities for a job
well done. Furthermore, it is well documented that no Congressman has
ever shown preferential treatment toward any of his or her satisfied
"constituents" (Thomas "Tip" O'Neill 1987).

When setting up the interview, I requested ... a 15-30 minute break
before the talk. Although I only needed about 10 minutes, I asked for 30
because of schedule slip. This should be in a room by yourself, so you
can collect your thoughts, calm down, and flip through your slides one
last time (which doesn't help the talk but is a calming ritual). This is
more important than I realized. At the one place I didn't get this, my
talk went very poorly, though I can't put my finger on exactly why,
except maybe my unnecessarily heightened nerves. At another place I was
given time but not a room; when I sat in the lounge or the seminar room, I couldn't escape people interested in chatting with me, so I excused myself to the bathroom and sat there for five minutes. The talk went great.

Writing Advice

My formula for good writing is simple: once you decide that you want to
produce good writing and that you can produce good writing, then all
that remains is to write bad stuff, and to revise the bad stuff until it
is good.

Academics mindlessly cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply
they are not willing to stand behind what they say. Those include
almost, apparently, comparatively, fairly, in part, nearly, partially,
predominantly, presumably, rather, relatively, seemingly, so to speak,
somewhat, sort of, to a certain degree, to some extent, and the
ubiquitous I would argue. (Does that mean you would argue for your
position if things were different, but are not willing to argue for it now?)

This can be as much the fault of the author as it is of the referee; it
is incumbent on the author to state as clearly as possible what the
merits, novelties, and ramifications of the paper are, and the fact that
an expert in the field could read the introduction and not see these is
a sign that the introduction is not yet of publication quality.

Use a lot of periods. Forget commas and semicolons. A period makes
people pause. Your sentences should be strong enough that you want
people to pause and think about it. This will also make your sentences
shorter. Short sentences are good.

The book's style advice, largely vapid and obvious ("Do not overwrite";
"Be clear"), may do little damage; but the numerous statements about
grammatical correctness are actually harmful. They are riddled with
inaccuracies, uninformed by evidence, and marred by bungled analysis.
Elements is a dogmatic bookful of bad usage advice, and the people who
rely on it have no idea how badly off-beam its grammatical claims are.

Greg Mankiw also has some great advice on How
to Write Well (a few of the points are specific to economics, since
the advice was written for his staff preparing the Economic Report of
the President, but nearly all of it is good advice for all writing).
(Geoffrey
Pullman is not a
fan, though.)

The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
The word "very" is very often very unnecessary.

Teaching

Teaching is not about information. It's about having an honest
intellectual relationship with your students. It requires no method, no
tools, and no training. Just the ability to be real. And if you can't be
real, then you have no right to inflict yourself upon innocent children.
...
It may be true that you have to be able to read in order to fill out
forms at the DMV, but that's not why we teach children to read. We
teach them to read for the higher purpose of allowing them access to
beautiful and meaningful ideas.

Interviewing

Thomas
Ptacek's The
Hiring Post debunks the silliness that passes as a typical
develop interview today, and suggests a better approach. (Quite a bit
of this applies to faculty recruiting interviews, which as done today
are typically even stranger and less connected to what matters than
software developer interviews.)

Years from now, we'll look back at the 2015 developer interview as an
anachronism, akin to hiring an orchestra cellist with a personality test
and a quiz about music theory rather than a blind audition... Engineering teams are not infantry squads. They aren't selected for
their ability to perform under unnatural stress. But that's what most
interview processes demand, often — as is the case with every interview
that assesses "confidence" — explicitly so.